December 23, 2014

... you can talk about whatever you want, but I've got a confession: I haven't done any of my shopping yet! If you need to shop on line, by the way, please use The Althouse Amazon Portal. I'm doing some in-the-flesh shopping myself, from my remote outpost in the south, where I've arrived at the end of a 2-day, 1200-mile drive. Did you notice? Meade is guarding the northern outpost.

Exactly what do these people mean by: "Let us take back our communities!"?

Do they want delineated areas for "Blacks," "Latinos," "Native Americans," and other designated voting blocs to live in, and these areas to be separate self-governing units? Within the state they are located in, or as Federal Reservations? Sovereign states?

@Edmund,I first began to really question my liberalism when I lived in Colorado. We were all supposed to hate Texans, then one day I realized that I had never met a Texan I didn't like. It was the beginning of the end.

"Whiplash" is the best music movie I have ever seen. Bar none. It's an you later and the six of us are still talking about every scene. A new genre - music thriller. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 96%. They underscored.

PS- Noticed it's been one whole day since we heard from the US President. Even money he's forgone the surprise visit to a war zone to greet and serve the troops dinner and instead shows up in N Korea to declare normalized relations?

I spent the whole frickin' day Christmas shopping myself, and, even more tiring, taking each kid, in turn, shopping for their siblings and Dad. Exhausting. And now I'm logged on, trying to make up the time by getting work done, as, for the first time in a while, I'm short on vacation time.

Still don't have the requisite number of presents for the oldest, who gets increasingly difficult to buy for. And my attempt to buy a Keurig-style coffeemaker for my husband was a bust because of this new Keurig 2.0 nonsense. If the new machines can only accept "official" Keurig-branded packs, are these packs also manufactured to only be usable with Keurig machines? Are the machines which advertise using either "K-cups" or small amounts of ground coffee destined to be obsolete.

Also, I discovered that there's a game store nearby with massive numbers of "Euro-style" board games for my middle son -- and also discovered that these things are stinkin' expensive.

I am in Austin now. I guess I will have to keep a look out for our Wisconsin power couple. Maybe at HEB, or the Whole Foods HQ store down town. As a lapsed Methodist, I invite them to the Christmas Eve service at St. John's UMC in Austin. We will have some of our grand-kids there.

AH! The Domain. A very nice, very successful mixed-use development, but is looked down on by lots of ageing hippy / young hipster Austinites, as it's not "wierd." Well screw wierd. I like nice stores(including that Tesla showroom) and nice restaurants.